Expert: Hank Hokamp - 7/19/2011

Question
QUESTION: the first civilizations (Egypt,Mesopotamia, etc) are all located in North Africa and Asia. Should American civilizations such as the Anasazi, Maya and others be given the same historical significance?

ANSWER:
   ANSWER: A definitive YES if not MORE significance:

   Around 300 B.C., the Maya adopted a hierarchical system of government with rule by nobles and kings. This civilization developed into highly structured KINGDOMS during the Classic period, A.D. 200-900. Their society consisted of many independent states, each with a rural farming community and large urban sites built around ceremonial centres.

   Building on the inherited inventions and ideas of earlier civilizations such as the Olmec, the Mayans developed astronomy, calendrical systems and hieroglyphic writing. The Mayans were noted as well for elaborate and highly decorated ceremonial architecture, including temple-pyramids, palaces and observatories, all built without metal tools. They were also skilled farmers, clearing large sections of tropical rain forest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizeable underground reservoirs for the storage of rainwater. The Mayans were equally skilled as weavers and potters, and cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster extensive trade networks with distant peoples.

   It started to decline around A.D. 900 when - for reasons which are still largely a mystery - the southern Maya abandoned their cities. When the northern Maya were integrated into the Toltec society by A.D. 1200, the Maya dynasty finally came to a close, although some peripheral centres continued to thrive until the Spanish Conquest in the early sixteenth century.

   Interesting subject, my friend. Thanks for your question. A good one.

         HANK



   

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Are the Mayans the only one who did something with any historical significance? how many years after the end of the first civilizations did the first American civilization? and what was the first American civilization?

Answer
  This might help, Ashliann:

  The ancient Hindu and Mayan civilizations exhibit other interesting convergences. Hindu records say that a member of a great race which preceded ours, a highly-developed personage known as Asuramaya, learned all the basic cosmic cycles and used his knowledge to determine the durations of the various geological and cyclical periods of human evolution. The chronology and computations of their still used Tamil calendar, say the Brahmans, are based upon the works of Asuramaya and upon carefully maintained collateral zodiacal records. Their most ancient extant work on astronomy, the Surya Siddhanta, says that Asuramaya lived toward the end of the Krita-yuga, a former age that ended approximately 2,165,000 years before the present. This would place Asuramaya at something less than 2.5 million years ago.

  Take care, my friend.

         HANK